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Theoretical Foundations
In this paper, I address myself to the public journalism "movement," meaning the people who have tried to experiment with an idea: that the press could contribute more to public life by recognizing that American democracy's troubles are its own, and by rethinking some of its assumptions and routines in light of that fact. In the pages that follow, I refer to a "we," which most often means we who have joined in the effort to understand what "public journalism" could and should be. But occasionally it refers to "we" Americans, for if there is one notion that is central to public journalism, it's that journalists are members of the political community, citizens themselves, and not bystanders to our public life . As members, they may have a particular role to play; and to be independent--and thus trustworthy--is certainly part of that role.
But here I write in the conviction that journalism itself, the art of telling our collective story, is never independent of the country and culture to which the story is sent. Public journalism, it seems to me, is about recognizing this truth, and trying to tell the truth at the same time.
Public journalism began its life as a kind of convenient premise that some of us simply decided to adopt. The premise was that there existed this other way of doing journalism that differed enough from conventional practice to warrant a new name. By acting as if this premise were true, we started to do the things that would help make it true. Some of us began to try to talk public journalism into existence, while others did things that felt like public journalism. The do-ers gave the talkers new things to talk about, while the talkers gave the do-ers a language to describe their doings. If public journalism is, in fact, a "movement" it proceeds in precisely this way: Practice inspires theory, so that theory can inform practice.
By proceeding in this fashion we have been borrowing the spirit of perhaps our only homegrown intellectual tradition: the American tradition of pragmatism. To be a pragmatist--in the intellectual rather than the political sense of the term--is to adopt the ideas that help you do your work. William James, the philosopher most associated with pragmatism, would often refer to the "cash value" of an idea. By "cash value" he did not mean what you could buy with it, but what you do with it, the help it gives you in accomplishing your task.
In our own case, the cash value of the founding premise--that there was something called public journalism--was clear. We could consider how public journalism works as a daily routine. We could ask what counts as success in public journalism, as compared to success in traditional journalism. We could try to discern what public journalism looks like on a page, or what it meant for training and development. And we could pose these questions before we fully understand what the term "public journalism" meant, or ought to mean.
All this is by way of saying what I've said from the beginning: that public journalism is an experimental movement. It's a bunch of people who don't know exactly what they're doing saying, "what if..." or "suppose we..."
* * *
A number of people in the medical field undertook a similar project some years ago. Sometime in the late 1970s, they began to ask themselves whether they had defined their mission in the wrong way. What if, they said, a doctor's job (or a nurse's job) is not just to cure disease, or treat the sick, or heal the injured, but rather to keep people healthy. Maybe a focus on injury and illness--what we might call a disease model of medicine--was too narrow. Maybe this narrow focus--the tendency to see people as patients, as bundles of problems--caused everyone to worry too little about preventive care.
For those in the medical field who started to think this way, a new term was needed to counterpose to the dominant framework, the disease model. Of course, simply recognizing the existence of the disease model was a kind of progress in itself, for when things are named they become thinkable, and so do their alternatives. In this case, the alternative that eventually emerged was called "holistic medicine," among other terms.
Holistic medicine, when it started, wasn't much of an "it." It was more of a premise, a possible "it." The premise went like this: If curing disease, treating illness and injury, was one way of doing medicine, then maybe keeping people healthy, or helping people maintain their own health, was a different way of doing medicine. This different approach begins with the proposition that health rather than disease is a doctor's primary concern. And it recognizes that while doctors can cure disease, the production of health is a job for patients and for the society as a whole.
Those who began this way didn't know exactly what they were doing. However--and this is the key point--they grasped that, in order to discover what holistic medicine was, they would have to begin talking and acting as if this thing called holistic medicine already existed. The "as if" approach brought results. Today, holistic medicine means some very important things: a careful attention to nutrition and diet, an emphasis on exercise and stress reduction, preventive care during critical periods like pregnancy, and a general quest for healthier ways to live. The idea of an HMO--a health maintenance organization--owes something to the holistic approach.
And it is not only the champions of holistic medicine, the believers, who support this approach. Almost everyone in America who pays attention to public discourse--everyone who reads the living section of the newspaper--realizes the importance of healthier living, including doctors who would never call their own approach "holistic." In a sense, then, holistic medicine has succeeded by losing its name, by becoming just good medicine, part of sound practice in the field.
Of course, the disease model of medicine has not gone away. It has too much cash value, as William James would have said. Where would heart surgeons be without the disease model? But there's now a challenger in the field, a different way of thinking about medicine that started as a premise and evolved into a practice--a practice that helped change American medicine.
Like holistic medicine, public journalism wants to begin in a different place. Rather than starting with the ruptures and breakdowns that make for news, it asks about the conditions that allow for a healthy public life. And it rejects as too limiting a disease model of community life, in which things become interesting only when they begin to break down. But just as an initial focus on health, rather than disease, didn't mean that doctors would stop treating the sick and injured, neither does an emphasis on the political health of the community mean that journalists should ignore the conflicts and ailments that inevitably occur in public life. But by beginning in a different place, public journalists end up with a wider view of their responsibilities.
As Davis Merritt, Jr. puts it in the subtitle of his book, Public Journalism and Public Life, "telling the news is not enough." There's also the job of improving the community's capacity to act on the news, of caring for the quality of public dialogue, of helping people engage in a search for solutions, of showing how a community might grapple with--and not only read about--its problems. None of this requires a radical departure from traditional First Amendment notions. As one journalist from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot said about the idea of listening carefully to citizens, "This is not exactly an epiphany." True enough. But neither was good nutrition. There was nothing "new" about the notion that diet shapes health. But emphasizing diet was a departure from what medicine had become under the influence of the disease model. At the time, there weren't even nutrition courses in most medical schools, just as there are no journalism courses now in how public life works.
Let's be clear about this: Just as the "new" approach to medicine could easily be seen as a return to traditional notions of care--indeed, to ancient wisdom about the body--so can public journalism be seen as a return to traditions in journalism that stress public service and a vital connection to the community. There's no epiphany here. But there is a departure from what journalism has become, from the disease model of political life.
Another parallel: Just as doctors and nurses cannot by themselves keep people healthy, so it is with public journalists. They cannot by themselves create a healthy public climate. Many others must do their part. And so implicit in the idea of public journalism is the need for new kinds of relationships between journalists, citizens and other potential actors in public life.
What we're really after is something Gene Patterson, former editor of the St. Petersburg Times, called "whole journalism." That's what Buzz Merritt is getting at when he says "telling the news is not enough." A whole journalism would not stop at exposing ills and ailments; it would also focus on creating a healthy public climate. A whole journalism would not equate politics with "government" and its misdeeds; it would see public problem-solving as the best definition of the political sphere, and it would ask how this sphere could be made to work better.
A whole journalism would not simply inform the public; it would realize that the climate of public discussion is often shaped by the press, by the flux and flow of media attention, and it would take responsibility for this formative power. A whole journalism would not pretend that toughness, fairness, and a powerful crap detector are virtues enough for the mature journalist; it would also cultivate a respect for ordinary life, for the common sense of concerned citizens, and for the public square as the place where we all get to join in the drama of democracy.
We don't have a whole journalism yet. That's our problem. In fact, the dream of a whole journalism is coming apart as the mass audience fragments and the media universe expands. So this quest may never succeed. But if anyone wants to know what public journalism is fundamentally about, it's about trying to make journalism whole again by stressing those things that have been left out, neglected, or not allowed to shine in the busy environment of the American newsroom: things like civic participation, deliberative dialogue, cooperative problem-solving, taking responsibility for the place where you live, making democracy work.
If public journalism one day loses its name, becoming "just good journalism," it will have succeeded. We will gladly accept imitation over flattery. And we don't care if public journalism is old or new. We don't care if itŐs considered radical or traditional. We don't even care if it's called public journalism. We're after results, not recruits. Which is to say we're pragmatists, focused on what works but also working within a certain focus: a concern for the future of public life, without which, we believe, journalism has no future.
* * *
In the four years since this movement first emerged I have had to reflect on a flaw in my own approach. Public journalism, as I said earlier, is about accepting a wider view of a journalist's responsibilities. Ask almost anyone who has tried it, and they'll say that it's harder than conventional journalism. For example, starting where citizens start, allowing news coverage to reflect their concerns, takes more time and thought than hitching yourself to experts and officials. In any sphere of life, when people get more responsibilities, but not more power, they get mad. If power without responsibility is a formula for arrogance, then responsibility without power is a formula for frustration.
So here was the flaw in my own approach. As I see it, my job is to make vocabularies; that's pretty much all I do. I try to get better at talking about public journalism. But as I talked a lot about wider responsibilities, I did not speak much of additional powers. Perhaps I was creating a formula for frustration, I thought. But what can I, a college professor, do to supply the press with additional power? When in doubt, a sage once said, draw a distinction; a good distinction can get you out of almost any jam. So I distinguished between two ways of supplying power. One is to give people in journalism more power, which I cannot do. The other is to make more visible the power they already have. That I thought I could do.
What follows is a thought experiment: an attempt to give public journalism some of the power it needs to do what it does. The experiment relies on a professor's only real power source: the resource of clarity, of giving names to things so the things can be reckoned with, made more visible. For what is visible can be handled by our collective intelligence, and that is my aim here.
First I need to say something about the existing vocabulary for describing the power of the press. What is the conventional view of press power? I asked myself that question, and here's what resulted:
The conventional view of press power
The press can:
* Bring key facts to light and raise consciousness
* Focus public attention
* Uncover abuses, act as a watchdog
* Ask the right (i.e. the "tough") questions
* Recommend courses of action
* Distribute praise and blame
* "Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted"
And here are the terms I want to add:
A revised vocabulary of press power
Journalists participate in:
1. Defining their dominion
2. The art of framing
3. The capacity to publicly include
4. The positioning effect
5. Shaping a master narrative
1. Defining dominion. The founders of holistic medicine understood that doctors had a power they were not quite acknowledging. In fact, all professions have this power, if they enjoy any degree of autonomy. It's the power to define the problem you will regard as real and claim responsibility for. That's what the disease model did. It limited the problem the medical profession chose to own. It said: We cure the sick and heal the injured, so come to us when you're ill or hurt. The alternative model, holistic medicine, defined the problem in a different way. It said: We keep people healthy, so come to us, as we'll come to you, for help in maintaining your own health.
Any profession that cannot define its own dominion lacks real autonomy-- indeed, lacks power. As a tenured professor, I have a great deal of freedom to define the problem that my own work will address. Thus, my interest in public journalism. But consider a high school teacher in any school system in America. She is constantly having her own dominion defined for her--by school boards, parents, and the society's expectations. It is we who say to her: Here's the problem you shall regard as real.
The press is still powerful enough to define its own dominion, especially when it comes to reporting and commenting on public life. Granted, there are real limitations of time and space, limitations of readers and viewers, limitations of economic necessity. No one should minimize these. But they do not eliminate the power of dominion that makes journalism a relatively autonomous profession, as compared, say, to high school teachers. That's one thing that freedom of the press means.
If journalists have the power to define their own dominion, how should they define it? Which problems should they regard as real? Public journalism tries to address this question directly, by asking journalists to include in their dominion the problem of making public life go well.
Let's look at the answer some journalists in Norfolk gave when they asked themselves: how should we define our dominion? There, a group of reporters and one editor responsible for public affairs coverage were designated the public life "team" and asked to devise a mission statement. After some bloodletting, this is what they arrived at:
We will revitalize a democracy that has grown sick with disenchantment. We will lead the community to discover itself and act on what it has learned. We will show how the community works or could work, whether that means exposing corruption, telling citizens how to make their voices heard, holding up a fresh perspective or spotlighting people who do their jobs well. We will portray democracy in the fullest sense of the word, whether in a council chamber or cul-de-sac. We do this knowing that a lively, informed, and most of all, engaged public is essential to a healthy community and to the health of these newspapers.
Notice, first, the emphasis on health in the last sentence. What this statement does is define the problems the Norfolk team will regard as real--and really theirs: Disenchantment with public life--yes, that's our problem. Inactive citizens--we agree: That's our problem. A narrow portrayal of democracy--we'll address that problem, and so on.
So here's a power journalists don't always admit to using: the power to redefine their own dominion. Obviously this power can be abused; that's how we know it's real. When the press steps in and decides to run truth boxes that examine campaign ads, it is redefining its dominion, adding a new responsibility: the power to police the advertising discourse. No one considers this an abuse of power because it is done in the name of truth, a widely-held value. There's an important lesson here: Any redefinition of the journalist's domain must be grounded, not in professional prerogatives, but in public values. That's why the philosophy of public journalism stresses things like civic participation, public conversation, cooperative problem-solving. These are not professional norms or journalistic conventions; they're part of a vision of democracy that citizens can be invited to share with journalists.
2. The art of framing. Imagine a story about the crack trade in any big city neighborhood. There are a number of ways of telling this story. The most common way would be to view the crack trade from a police or crime perspective. Here, you would focus on the complaints of neighbors, the attempts by cops to shut the dealers down, the drug murders, the arrests and convictions, and so on. A very different way of telling the story would be to view the crack trade as a neighborhood business. Here, you would describe how the business is run, the way decisions are made, the various interests involved, the relationship between this business and the rest of the neighborhood.
Now, which is the "right" way to understand the crack trade? Clearly, there is no simple answer to this question, although some may want to pretend that there is. The crack trade is a police problem, but it is also a business. Equally good, equally accurate, equally true stories can be told from each of these two perspectives. To put it another way, the two stories get at different truths. And this is the power of framing. To frame a story is to select the relevant context by focusing attention on some things but not others. It is to also to picture the action in a certain way--the crack trade as a crime story, the crack trade as a business.
Framing is one of the most powerful and subtle things journalists do. To understand why, we can look at the values that lie embedded in framing decisions. When the crack trade is treated as a crime story, the values of lawfulness and public safety create the story. Social values are being violated, and that's what makes the crack trade "news." In viewing the crack trade as a business, we have to recognize that the people who sell crack are upholding certain social values, even as they violate others. For example, they start at the bottom and rise through hard work. They have to be on time; they have to be organized. They work in teams and respect hierarchies. Most of all, they learn about money. So while the crime story emphasizes the violation of certain social values, the business story emphasizes the acceptance of other social values. This is why framing matters. It shapes the way we view things. The dealer who looks like a criminal in one portrait, emerges as an entrepreneur in another. Which is not to say he's not a criminal-- only that "criminal" does not describe everything of note here.
Journalism schools don't teach this, but it's nonetheless true: Facts can't tell you how they want to be framed. Journalists decide how facts will be framed, and that means making decisions about which values will structure the story. We do not have a coherent philosophy that instructs the uncountable acts of framing that occur in daily journalism. What we have instead are certain rituals of framing: the way everyone does it. The abortion story that quotes pro-lifers and their opponents is an example of a framing ritual. It stresses the value of conflict. It says, through conflict we can know the truth; or it says, get both sides and decide for yourself because that's how political debate works. The very idea of getting "both" sides, of there being two sides to every story (rather than three or four), the overwhelming preference for two-ness in journalism is itself a powerful framing ritual.
One of the best ways of understanding journalism is to have it done to you. That certainly goes for acts of framing. In the American Journalism Review 's first feature on public journalism, the magazine had to decide how to frame the phenomenon. Here's the result:
Adherents of the fast-growing movement say news organizations must listen to their audiences and play more active roles in their communities if they are to flourish. But nonbelievers worry it will hurt credibility by turning the media into a player rather than a chronicler.
This is an accurate enough summary. The facts are more or less correct. Note, however, how the story divides the journalism world into believers and non-believers, and suggests that what's at stake is the "flourishing" of news organizations. As Buzz Merritt later pointed out in a letter to the AJR editor, we think what's at stake is the flourishing of democracy and public life. To us, that's what public journalism is about. By framing the story as one of media survival, the reporter took a derivative concern, an element in public journalism, and made it the primary concern, the definition of public journalism.
Of course, Alicia Shepard, who reported the piece, is under no obligation to see things the way we do. She's an independent intelligence creating an independent account, exercising her right to frame things the way she sees them. And so public journalism emerges in her treatment as a religious cause, with believers shouting a gospel and non-believers warning of doom. It could have been seen as a conversation within journalism, with participants asking certain questions that invite other participants to reply. These two ways of framing the phenomenon--religion on the one hand, conversation on the other--are both supportable by the facts. Choosing between them is an art. And this art is also a moral exercise. It always involves certain values--the values journalists bring to their work, the values their work supports.
Many of the typical complaints about bias and negative news can better be understood as criticisms of the framing decisions journalists make. But since framing is not in the public vocabulary of the press, complaints can't be addressed to an act that is rarely acknowledged. So instead people say: You're biased, you're too negative. Perhaps what they mean is: "This was narrowly framed."
Framing is something journalists prefer to watch other people do. That's why the term "spin" was invented. The "spin doctors" are people outside of journalism who openly struggle to frame stories their way. A reporter is not a spinner; a reporter is the one spun by a figure like David Gergen, who is so adept at the gentle art of spinning that Washington journalists talk of receiving "Gergen's lotion" on the phone. Spin is a good example of the power of naming. It names the phenomenon in such a way that it can be expelled from the world of journalism and assigned to other people. Reporters are not spin artists; or if they are, they're violating the code of the profession.
I hesitate to put it so bluntly, but here it is: Acknowledging the ubiquity, the everyday-ness, of framing in journalism is a gut-level issue of intellectual honesty. Those who are unwilling to admit that they select frames are saying, "I don't want to be a part of that conversation. I don't want to think about that dimension of my job."
Becoming more thoughtful about framing is central to what public journalism is about. Because part of what we're struggling toward is a better philosophy of framing. We're trying to talk openly about the values that lie embedded in framing decisions, so that journalists can think carefully about a power they've always had, but haven't named, and therefore haven't owned.
What our philosophy says, so far, is that framing is not only an art--but one of the important democratic arts. Done well, framing in journalism should proceed from and support certain values, and these are public values, democratic values: the values of genuine conversation, broad participation, deliberative dialogue, public problem-solving; the values of inclusion, civic responsibility, cooperative and complimentary action; the values of caring for the community, taking charge of the future, overcoming the inertia of drift; finally, the value of hope, understood as a renewable resource. These are things public journalism is "for," and as a philosophy it doesn't apologize for that stance.
The art of framing is to find a way of telling our collective story that gives these democratic values their due--without artificially injecting them where they have no truthful place, without ignoring or slighting in any way the facts that contradict these values. We don't know yet how this art should be practiced. We don't even know if we've got all the values right. We're making it up as we go along, which is what the spirit of experiment demands. Public journalism means asking: How are we framing this story, and how should we frame it, if we want to fortify public life, civic participation, deliberative dialogue? My claim is that this question--how should we frame things?--is an empowering question. It has pragmatic value; it helps us do our work.
3. The capacity to publicly include. I've borrowed this term from the communication scholar Michael Schudson, who writes of the journalist's "capacity to publicly include." What he means is that a significant power the press owns is to decide who (or what) will be visible in the frame. When the story of public life is told, who gets the prominent roles and who is rendered invisible? This is really an aspect of framing, but I have given it a separate heading because the power to include is so basic to what we mean by democracy.
During the Persian Gulf War, I noticed the following pattern in televised discussions of the war. The people from whom the networks sought commentary were virtually all the same people--retired military men and academic specialists who commanded technical expertise. The capacity to publicly include was being used in a particular way. The result--unintentional, perhaps, but effective--was to define the war as the province of experts, and to uphold the importance of a particular brand of expertise: technical knowledge of military doctrine, strategy and equipment.
Watching this pattern unfold on my television screen, I asked myself what other way of knowing about war ought to be visible on the public stage. And I tried to conduct a little experiment. I chose one alternative to the technical frame, and I tried to make the case, with every TV journalist who would hear me, for including this alternative in discussions of the war. The lens I chose was a moral lens. I knew there existed a lively discourse among historians, philosophers, theologians and clergy about the concept of a "just war." There were interesting arguments on several sides about how to determine a just from an unjust action, and these arguments proceeded from different ethical and religious traditions. The concept of a just war had obvious applications to the Persian Gulf, and would make for a compelling dialogue--compelling especially to viewers at home who can relate more easily to a moral discussion than they can to a lecture on military hardware.
I made these points with several television producers, all at the network level. Two of them had called me seeking commentary on patterns in media coverage. I faxed to them a list of experts in the just war concept. I had a research assistant dig up several articles on the subject. Well, my experiment failed. An in-depth discussion of a just war never aired on network television. The existing framing rituals were too strong; the alternative frame too novel. The network continued to blitz us with technical experts because that is the form of expertise they understood and valued. In making this decision, they were using their capacity to publicly include.
Of course, it is their right to make this choice, but they ought to realize what kind of choice it is. By selecting whom you'll include in a discussion, you're making a statement about what kind of discussion people require, and what's worth knowing. Consider the habit of quoting various spin doctors after a presidential debate. There's a decision about whom to publicly include. And here's the statement it makes: The most important thing to know about a political debate is who won and who lost, and the people who'll tell us are professionals paid to say their side won. Over time, viewers treated to this absurd ritual invented by the news media are forced to conclude that journalists understand little about them and their concerns.
So the capacity to publicly include is a crucial power, and not only because it gives some people visibility over others. It also renders the public world in a particular way. By choosing whom to include, the press tells us whose world public life is, who knows about it, who acts within it, whose voices count, whose lives are relevant, whose concerns are central. To put it another way, journalists make casting decisions. They decide whom to cast in what roles in the drama of public life.
Public journalism, trying to live honestly, says that decisions about whom to include are decisions about values. And we're trying to discover the values that are relevant. So far what we've been able to come up with is this: Using their capacity to publicly include, journalists should try to give citizens a larger place in the public world, in their capacity as citizens. Let me explain what I mean by that.
A citizen is not a victim, a citizen is not a spectator, a citizen is not a quote machine, a ventilator of steam, or a cute adornment to the news. To include citizens in their capacity as citizens is to ask them to deliberate with others, in addition to expressing their own opinion. It is to see things from their perspective, in addition to taking their photos. It is treat them as actors, participants, as well as consumers or clients. It is to hold them to a certain standard of citizenship--which includes civility, mutual respect, informed participation, a willingness to listen and respond--rather than condescendingly treasuring everything they say because it comes from an ordinary person.
To see people as citizens is to elevate them to a role they may not always do justice to, which is another way of saying that democracy is frequently disappointing. So, for that matter, is journalism. We are all frequently disappointing to each other, but we learn to live together by seeing each other as citizens, which means: "somehow equal despite all differences." Seeing people as citizens is the art of finding that equal station to which all are entitled in a democracy, and reserving a place in the news for people when they occupy that station.
What I mean by Ňfinding that equal station to which we're all entitledÓ is locating the points where citizens are good judges, where they are competent to advance the discussion. When Vicki Porter, editor of the Olympian in Olympia, Washington, decides that citizens should have a say in the economic future of their city, when she helps organize a series of forums where they can deliberate about such matters, she is saying that citizens are good judges of the basic direction the community should go. And she's employing her power to publicly include them. Public journalism says: When you include people, include them as citizens, which is another way of saying: Give them their due because the story of public life is their story, and journalists can learn to tell it that way.
So public journalists take hold of their power to publicly include and ask themselves: How are we using this power, and how can we use it to give citizens and citizenship itself a stronger place in the public world, when we choose how to frame it?
4. The positioning effect. Among their various powers, journalists have the ability to arrange our encounter with the public world, to make things come at us in a certain way. This is what I mean by the "positioning effect." Let me use another example from the Persian Gulf war to illustrate.
Think back to the gun-turret tapes we saw during the Gulf War-- sometimes called video-game footage. The effect of these images was to position us inside the cockpit of American jets as they completed their bombing runs. Now, compare that position to the very different one we occupied with Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw of CNN as they watched American bombs rain down on them in Baghdad. Clearly, the news can position us in different ways, feeling different things, depending on the location from which it arrives. With the pilots, we're in on the launch of American weapons, and we feel the same surge of power they get when their missiles hit the target. With Arnett and Shaw, we're on the receiving end of the bombing, and feel some of the terror and confusion of those who are targeted. The difference between hitting the target and being the target is, I think you'll agree, a significant one, and this is what I mean in saying that journalists arrange our encounter with the public world.
News stories position us in a wide variety of ways--as spectators or as participants, as insiders or as outsiders, as voters, as consumers, as fans, as victims, as celebrants, as sentimentalists. Take the sort of story we commonly call a "tear jerker." It puts us in the position of the jerkee, the one from whom tears are pulled.
Although the positioning effect is routine in journalism, it escapes the sort of discussions that typically go on in newsrooms. When have you ever heard one editor say to another, "Wait a minute, how are we positioning readers here, as what sort of people, doing what sort of things?" The ritual of balance tries to avoid the positioning effect. The perfectly balanced story says: Take your own position, we won't determine one for you. Of course, it's not that simple. What the "balanced" story often does is position people as helpless spectators to a bitter and unresolvable dispute, leaving no middle ground, no room for ambivalence, no place where many of us might want to stand.
So positioning is unavoidable, and again, I believe it's a matter of intellectual honesty to admit this fact and grapple with the consequences. I am not saying, by the way--and I want to be clear about this--that the news is inevitably biased by the opinions or feelings of journalists. I am not saying that since bias is inevitable, we might as well be up front about it. I am definitely not saying that traditional concerns about fairness, balance and neutrality can be downplayed. On the contrary, I think those issues are central to public journalism.
Public journalism actually strives for a deeper level of fairness by taking note of the power of framing, by its willingness to say, "Wait a minute: how are we positioning people here?" And by asking: How should we be positioning people? Again, we don't know the answer to this question, but it might go something like this. When journalists position people, as they inevitably will, they ought to place them as often as possible in the position of citizen. Now that sounds good, but what does it mean?
To position people as citizens means to treat them:
* as making their own contribution to public life
* as potential participants in public affairs
* as stakeholders, with a personal interest in public affairs
* as citizens of the whole, with shared interests
* as a deliberative body-- that is, a public with issues to discuss
* as choosers, decision-makers
* as learners, with skills to develop
* as connected to place and responsible for place
Public journalism is the art of positioning people as citizens, where the world comes at them in a certain way. We're still learning about what this art involves. Albert Einstein once asked himself: What would the universe look like astride a bolt of lightening? (The result was the theory of relativity.) We're asking: What would the public world look like if it came at us in a way that invited us in as citizens? When, for example, candidates for office are treated as manipulators of public sentiment, devising clever strategies that play on our fears, we're invited to mistrust their rhetoric and see through their phony appeals. That's one kind of invitation. When candidates for public office are treated as job candidates, with job descriptions, rZ*sumZ*s and a statement of their qualifications, that's another kind of invitation. Both may be necessary. But they position us in different ways.
Over time, the positioning effect tells us whom to be when we enter public life, and that's why it matters. If journalists were regularly positioning us as citizens--finding hundreds of ways to do so--the news might be a more inviting place for people to join in the drama of democracy. It might lead people into public life, instead of repelling them from it.
5. Shaping a master narrative. Journalists are story-tellers and they are pledged to provide a story that is accurate and fair. But we often overlook a certain aspect of story-telling, and that is the ability to shape a master narrative. By a master narrative I mean the story that produces all the other stories; or, to put it another way, the Big Story that lends coherence and shape to all the little stories journalists tell. In the Bible, the master narrative--the story that produces all the other stories--is the theme of creation and redemption, or the fall from grace and search for salvation. A master narrative is not a particular story journalists write; it is the story they are always writing when they tell the stories they typically tell.
In election-coverage, the master narrative is usually winning, despite the endless critiques that have been made of horse-race coverage. Winning the race is what the campaign is assumed to be about, and so most of the stories concern who's winning, how they're winning, why they're winning, and so on. In political science classes at every university in this county, freshmen and sophomores learn what democratic politics is about, according to the master narrative many of their professors employ. In this story, politics is government and government decides who gets what. Therefore, to study politics is to analyze the factors that determine who gets what in the marketplace of democracy, which is crowded with interests groups fighting it out.
One more example: In White House coverage, the master narrative is shaped by a tendency first noticed by political reporter Sidney Blumenthal--the notion of a "permanent campaign." Here, the assumption is that politics is a continuous election; the president is always trying to win votes, his opponents are always trying to thwart him. The president's approval rating tells us who's winning the continuous election. As the story gets told and re-told this way, the approval rating takes on magic significance--more significant, at times, than the president's words or deeds, or even the state of the nation. Which is merely to say that master narratives matter.
Clearly, the permanent campaign is a particular way of looking at politics; that is, it's a kind of framing. What I'm emphasizing here is the productive power of the master narrative, the way it generates an almost limitless supply of stories that add up to one Big Story--the story of the president struggling to remain popular. What can you do with the idea of the master narrative? What's the cash value, as William James would put it? It suggests, first of all, a useful category of self-study. That is, you can ask yourself: What are the master narratives we're offering the community? What are the stories that produce all the other stories? Imagine a weekend retreat, where a news organization sought to identify the master narratives it relied on to tell the story of, say, Olympia, Washington. Trying to find these patterns, and name them, would be an instructive exercise, for what you'd be inquiring into is a less-than conscious use of your own power. Then, of course, the question you would be prepared to ask is: How can we improve our master narratives?
That's what the Charlotte Observer did in its 1992 campaign coverage. It succeeded in changing the master narrative from the story of how the campaign was won, to a new story: the story of citizens voicing their concerns, and listening to what the candidates said about them. Everyone in journalism took notice of this shift because everyone in journalism is tired of the horse race as a master narrative. The editors in Charlotte, following Buzz Merritt's initial efforts in this direction in 1990, simply determined, on their own authority, that the master narrative would change. Once they made that decision, much else followed. Hundreds of stories flowed from the Big Story: Citizens voice their concerns, and listen for the candidates' response.
* * *
The election project in Charlotte involved all of the powers I have been discussing. It redefined the journalist's domain to include a responsibility for the campaign dialogue. It consciously framed a citizens' agenda and assumed that the campaign could be framed as a discussion of that agenda. It employed the capacity to publicly include in a manner that powerfully included citizens as "players" in the campaign, asking the candidates to face important issues. It positioned people as discussants rather than complainers, as participants on many days before election day. And it chose a new master narrative for election coverage: Citizens define an agenda of concerns, candidates (and journalists) respond.
Doing public journalism means asking yourself: How are we defining our dominion here, which problems are we willing to own? It means asking yourself: How are we framing the story of public life, and what values lie embedded in our framing decisions? It means thinking carefully about your capacity to publicly include, asking yourself tough questions not only about who gets a voice and a place in the news, but in what capacity are people invited in-- as citizens of the whole or as quote machines? Public journalism means asking yourself, "How are we positioning people here, and how can we invent new ways of positioning them as citizens?"
Public journalism is about improving the master narrative, so that it produces good stories that simultaneously tell the truth about public life and create more space for citizens. How do we tell the story of this community in a manner that invites citizens to see their stake and join in the story as informed participants? That's the challenge for public journalism as a narrative art.
That's what I've tried to do in fashioning the tale I've told here. I've tried to give the story of public journalism an open quality--emphasizing that there's a lot we don't know yet. I've tried to make the story both descriptive of where we are, and suggestive of where we need to be. I've tried to be a good pragmatist, by focusing on the use value of these ideas, what we can do with them. I've tried to suggest a lot of different entry points into public journalism, so that if one doesn't work for you, another might. I've tried to lend some coherence to what we're doing--suggesting a kind of master narrative for public journalism--without overdoing it, and giving the story an artificial order that future developments will overturn. Finally, I've tried to be as hopeful as I can while suggesting we have a lot of difficult work ahead. In general, I've tried to give the story some of the qualities that will enable others--as well as myself--to move it forward.
But of course I can't say whether I've succeeded at any of this. That's something for readers to judge.
In closing, let me return to the "as if" approach. Walt Whitman, perhaps our finest poet, once said, "The United States themselves are the greatest poem." It's in that spirit that I remind you that the greatest "as if" statement we have is the United States Constitution. The Constitution is, in theory, authored by the American people, who actually speak in the preamble: "We, the people." But the Constitution is also the author of the American people, who are constituted as a political community by the same document they supposedly authored. The Constitution is what creates an "us" from a collection of peoples, but it is also what "the people" originally created. It speaks as if an American nation already exists, and thus creates that nation.
This ambiguity has been noted many times by scholars, but here is my point in remarking on it. The Norfolk public life team created its own mission statement. But the mission statement also creates the public life team. It's an "as if" statement--a kind of hypothesis--for it speaks as if the aspirations it names can become the normal operations of the team. The hypothesis then creates the team's experiment. We need a little more of that in the American press-- envisioning a journalism that is perhaps a little beyond the grasp of the craft, but still within its reach. Citizens, public officials and other civic actors can help by trying to envision a better public climate, even as the press tries to report on one. Remember, too, that the art of enabling people is what gives meaning to the task of informing people.
To paraphrase Whitman, the United States themselves are the greatest hypothesis. Which is not to equate this little movement with the poetry in the Constitution, or with the constitution of our great poet. It is merely to say that public journalism is a very American thing to do.
Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University and, since 1993, Director of the Project on Public Life and the Press. This article is adapted from a presentation to the Project's seminar on public journalism at the American Press Institute, Reston, Virginia, Nov. 11, 1994.
Copyright © 1997 by the Kettering Foundation
© Copyright 2001 by YourSITE.com
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